About Me

I'm a librarian who is interested in all things British. I try to visit London as often as possible, and am always planning my next trip. I lived in Sweden for a few years with my Swedish husband, so the occasional Swedish reference may occur . . .

I'm Currently Reading

Friday, July 24, 2015

Viper Wine concerns the exploits of Venetia Stanley, one of the great beauties of the 17th century. Five years older than her husband, the explorer and adventurer Kenelm Digby, she was so concerned about growing older and losing her famous looks that she retreats from society. She asks her husband to prepare a tonic for her that will help her to regain her youthful beauty, but he refuses, still seeing her as the beautiful woman he married. She eventually finds someone else to provide her with the Viper Wine potion which will make her beautiful again. As a couple, the Digbys are each immersed in their own worlds and too distracted to really seem a believable pair.

This book was very hard to read. I wasn't sure what was happening most of the time. There were elements of time travel and descriptions of things like radio transmissions sort of thrown in here and there (in a book set in the 1630s) that were distracting and annoying. The characters and setting were interesting enough (and based on real events), but I guess the author felt a straightforward narrative wouldn't be challenging enough. The result was a confusing, meandering, mess of a story.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Viper Wine from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

The Case of the Sin City Sister concerns searches for missing family members. Sister Evangeline Divine (pronounced Di-VEEN) is a Harley riding nun who has become entranced with her father's private detective business. Her father Jackson, a retired cop, lives in Madrid, New Mexico. Sister Eve takes a leave of absence from the convent to help her father when she learns her sister Dorisanne has gone missing.

Dorisanne lives in Las Vegas, and has always had money troubles. Her husband Robbie is a known gambler and troublemaker, and the family worries that he's dragged her into his troubles. At the same time, the detective agency gets a new case: to find out what happened to a man who came to the area in the 1880s to mine turquoise, but was never heard from again. Skeletal remains have been found in a cave, and a man from North Carolina hears about it and wonders if the body could be that of his long lost great-great grandfather. So much time has passed that the Divines are unsure what they can find out, but they take the case and set to work. Another client asks Jackson to dig on his property to see if he can find any of the rumored gold that's buried there.

Sister Eve decides that she has to go to Las Vegas to see if she can trace Dorisanne's movements. Although she's perfectly content with her plans to ride her Harley all the way to Vegas, her father has other ideas. Daniel, a current cop and her father's former partner, takes a leave of absence to travel to Vegas with Eve. It seems that Daniel is quite fond of Las Vegas, and goes there rather frequently. The pair begin at Dorisanne's apartment, where they meet Pauline, a neighbor and fellow casino cocktail waitress who seems to have befriended Dorisanne. Pauline has problems of her own, but she agrees to speak with Eve, even though she claims not to know much about Dorisanne's mysterious departure. As Eve and Daniel investigate, they begin to notice several strange people and vehicles following them. Could they be connected to Dorisanne's disappearance?

I enjoyed the unconventional Sister Eve and her adventures, which included being stranded in a hospital morgue and hot-wiring a motorcycle. She has to make a decision about whether or not to return to the convent, but given her love of investigation, it won't be easy for her to choose one life over the other.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of The Case of the Sin City Sister from BookLook Bloggers in exchange for this review

Monday, July 6, 2015

Even though M. Perdu has a job that sounds perfect, he's still pretty miserable in The Little Paris Bookshop. He runs an "apothecary bookstore" moored in the Seine in Paris. Visitors to the shop know that they might not leave with the book they came in for, but that M. Perdu will unerringly be able to recommend the book that they need at that precise moment in their lives.

Unfortunately, he's not able to fix his own problems so easily. Twenty years ago, when he was 30, the great love of his life, Manon, left him with no explanation. He was totally broken by this experience -- so much so that when a letter arrived from her a few weeks later, he was unable even to open it. He put it in a drawer in a kitchen table, in a room which he then walled off with a bookcase. There matters have stood for two decades, until he's bullied into donating some furniture to a new tenant in his apartment building. The new tenant, Catherine, is a middle-aged woman who has been abandoned by her husband, and is terribly distraught. When she discovers the letter in the drawer of the table M. Perdu gives her, she invites him over for dinner to read it. These two broken souls might be just what the other needs, but M. Perdu can't give up on his heartbreak just yet.

Another tenant in the building is Max Jordan, a young man who's just found literary success with his first novel. However, he finds the rabid, enthusiastic fans hard to take, so he's trying to hide out while he waits for inspiration to strike so he can begin on his follow-up novel. When M. Perdu decides to unhook his literary barge and set off in search of his long-lost love, Max impulsively jumps on board for the journey.
And so they begin a journey toward the south. Along the way, they pick up more people who are searching for lost loves (among other things). Scattered throughout the book are selections from Manon's travel diary from 20 years earlier. Also, the end of the book features recipes and a suggested "Emergency Literary Pharmacy" recommending books for various "ailments."

The book starts off strongly, but then meanders along aimlessly, much like the characters on board the barge. I had a hard time accepting that everyone could just pick up and leave their current lives, with no thought of how they would support themselves, and then immediately, wherever they ended up, just miraculously be taken in and given food, shelter and jobs by the people they randomly encounter. The whole book, from about chapter 5 on, was a huge let-down for a promising book. The characters were all so woe-is-me that I really didn't care if they were ever happy again.Disclaimer: I received a copy of The Little Paris Bookshop from Blogging For Books in exchange for this review

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

I knew that one of my favorite writers, Marian Keyes, had a new novel coming out, so I was thrilled to be able to buy it a few weeks early on my recent trip to London (it had already been released in the UK). It was a good thing I decided to invest in the book, since long delays at the airport meant that I had plenty of time to get engrossed in the story.

The Woman Who Stole My Life concerns Stella Sweeney, a Dublin-based woman who is the author of the recent book One Blink at a Time. Stella had suddenly developed Guillain-Barre Syndrome and spent months in the hospital recovering. She was unable to speak or move and could only communicate by blinking her eyes. Her neurologist, Dr. Mannix Taylor, takes the time to actually try to talk to her, working out the blinking code to ask questions.

Stella is married to Ryan, but their marriage, after 18 years, has reached a somewhat boring plateau. Ryan has always dreamed of becoming an artist, but through a series of events has gotten into the custom bathroom remodeling business. He's very successful, but unfulfilled. Their two children are typical teenagers: Betsy is dreamy and laid-back, while Jeffrey is petulant and moody. Stella co-owns a salon with her more driven sister, Karen. When the illness strikes, everyone must try to get along without her. At the same time, there seems to be an undeniable spark between Stella and her neurologist . . .

Once she's back home and recovering from her illness, Stella is stunned to receive a box of books. It seems that while blinking out messages to Mannix, he was keeping a log of her thoughts and sayings. He's assembled them into a book and had it privately printed. Stella is touched and gives out the books to family and friends. When one of her books makes its way into the hands of a celebrity, suddenly agents and publishers are knocking at her door.

Eventually, Stella splits fairly amicably with Ryan and, after a similarly civilized divorce between Mannix and his too-good-to-be-true wife Georgie, the former patient and her doctor begin a torrid relationship -- much to the disgust of Jeffrey. The publishers are so enthusiastic about the prospects for Stella's book that they insist she relocate to New York City to begin book tours and publicity work. Mannix quits his job and follows along, as do the children. Ryan is understandably miffed that his ex-wife is becoming world-famous when he is the "artist" in the family.

During exhausting rounds of publicity, Stella is grateful for the help of her new best friend. Gilda Ashley bumps into Stella in a store, and immediately becomes her personal trainer, stylist, and confidant. But is Gilda really too good to be true?

The book shifts back and forth in time, with present-day scenes letting us know that Stella is back in Ireland, broke, jobless, and without Mannix. So what happened to the glamorous NYC life? Those events fill out the story, as she struggles with her new-found fame, and the demands of trying to write a follow-up book.

Marian Keyes's books have always been favorites of mine due to being laugh-out-loud funny, while at the same time dealing with difficult and sometimes tragic subjects. This book did have some funny moments, but overall, it was something of a let-down. Stella was so wish-washy, especially where loutish son Jeffrey was concerned, that it was hard to feel anything but exasperation for her. There were also some very strange elements to the story, such as when she and Mannix were faced with financial difficulties -- it apparently never dawned on either of them that he could just resume his medical career.

I'm always thrilled to read a new book by this wonderful author, but I can only hope that in the next one she'll regain her comedic spark. She's already given each of the Walsh sisters her own book, but maybe she'll discover a long-lost Walsh cousin or something to take up the reigns of the next story!

Final Verdict for The Woman Who Stole My Life:
Two Gherkins a somewhat disappointing look at the life of an expected celebrity

Monday, June 8, 2015

I remembered reading some news stories about some clusters of suicides among young people in a Welsh town, and was intrigued that the plot of the book What You Left Behind seemed to focus on the same type of phenomenon. Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher comes to the sleepy rural English town of Radcote to visit her sister, Jo. Radcote was the scene of a rash of suicides among young people a few years previously, and recently it seems as if the cycle is starting up again.

Jo, who has a history of expecting Lorraine to bail her out of trouble, is separated from her partner and has an 18 year old son, Freddie. Freddie is moping about, being generally moody and uncommunicative, but it turns out his behavior is due to more than growing pains. For several weeks, he's been the target of a particularly nasty online bullying campaign. He hasn't told anyone about it, but he is becoming increasingly disturbed by it.

Jo is close to some people in town, Tony and Sonia Hawkeswell, whose son Simon recently committed suicide. Sonia tries to overcome her grief by working at the local homeless shelter, and she's browbeaten her daughter Lana into also volunteering there. Sonia has decided that Lana is going to become a doctor and that volunteering will look good on her university applications. Their household is also made up of Tony's autistic brother, Gil. Gil lives in a separate building from the main house, but is pretty much involved in everything the family does. He's also an extremely talented artist. When Lorraine sees a drawing he made of the scene of another supposed suicide, she becomes convinced that all the new suicides might instead be foul play.

I really wanted to like this book, due to the setting and intriguing premise, but it was too annoying to be enjoyable. All of the characters seem to be harboring secrets, which they refuse to tell anyone, but which could likely be easily remedied if they would just SAY SOMETHING! You know it's all going to come out in the end, so why keep going over and over how, for instance, Freddie just *can't* tell anyone about the bullying because "that would make it worse." Just how exactly, we never hear. It's not that Freddie is embarrassed about being targeted, or afraid of physical harm -- his reasoning is that the non-stop online abuse "will get worse." Um, OK . . . As the various characters are wrestling with their secrets which they can't tell anyone, they seem to continue to have the same conversations over and over (especially Freddie and Lana). Nothing ever gets sorted out and they continue to cover the same useless ground over and over, chapter after chapter.

The author does try to throw in a few red-herrings to point us toward several suspects, but I'm still not very clear on why some of the suicides were arranged to look like murder. By the end, we know who the supposed murderer was, but the motivation is still murky. There are also lots of forged suicide notes, false confessions to crimes and contradictory statements (in one chapter Lorraine has read a supposed suicide note, in the next she's wondering what was in the note) which don't really add up to a cohesive and enjoyable story. The novel ends with something that is supposed to be a shocking twist, but by that time I'd long since stopped trying to make any sense of what the characters were doing and why.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of What You Left Behind from Blogging for Books in exchange for this review

Friday, May 22, 2015

Forensic science developments in recent years have helped to solve many crimes that might not even have been recognized as murder in past times. The events in The Anatomist's Apprentice take place in the year 1780, when the study of anatomy, not to mention forensics, was in its infancy.

At the country estate of Boughton Hall, a terrible scene takes place. The young lord of the manner, Edward Crick, experiences a terrifying episode of convulsions and excruciating pain before dying in front of his horrified sister Lydia. Lydia is married to the Irishman Michael Ferrell, who inherits the estate upon the death of his brother-in-law. Since Edward was so young and there is a motive for someone to want him dead, tongues in the village begin to wag. In an effort to silence the gossip, Michael calls in two local doctors to examine the corpse. The doctors, not surprisingly, don't waste too much time on pondering the cause of death, and decide it was from natural causes.

Lydia's cousin, Francis Crick, is a medical student who is studying under the American Dr. Thomas Silkstone. He mentions the pioneering work in anatomy and chemical analysis that Dr. Silkstone is doing, which causes Lydia to ask the doctor to examine the corpse of her brother. She is very disturbed by the rumors which call her husband a murderer. Even though Michael Ferrell has turned into a disagreeable spouse, she feels very loyal to him and doesn't want the family name to be ruined.

Dr. Silkstone agrees to take on the case, both to find out if murder was done, and to please the beautiful Lydia. Things begin to look even worse for Michael when it becomes known that he set up a still to brew up his own rat poison (doesn't everyone?). Dr. Silkstone takes samples from the by now decomposing body of Lord Crick, but is unable to find any rat poison. This doesn't stop the rumors, nor does it protect Ferrell from becoming a suspect.

No one on the estate, apart from Lydia, seems particularly upset at the young Lord's death. In fact, more than one person had a motive for wanting him dead, but none as much as Ferrell. Naturally, someone doesn't want Dr. Silkstone to get close to the truth, so he is brutally attacked. Will he be able to discover the truth before there are more deaths?

Well, unfortunately not. As the bodies pile up, the red herrings also fly thick and fast. Just when you think the murder has been revealed, someone else dies and suspicion falls on a different person. That happening once might be OK, but it happens several times and starts to get really annoying before the book finally ends and we apparently have tied up all the loose ends, and assigned blame for all the deaths to the correct people.

While I can appreciate that the author wanted the story to have twists and turns, there were just too many of them to make the story enjoyable. I would have preferred a more straightforward resolution to the mystery. This sleepy village suddenly being overrun with dead bodies and plotting murderers was just too far-fetched to be believable.

Final verdict for The Anatomist's Apprentice:
Two Gherkins, for being a mystery with too many killers coming out of the woodwork

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

I had high hopes for Murder in Piccadilly, a book that combines two of my favorite things: a mystery and a London setting. This book was originally published in 1936, and has been re-issued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. Unfortunately, to my mind, the book doesn't hold up very well for the modern reader.

The story is a somewhat familiar one. Bobbie Cheldon is a young man who lives with is widowed mother in somewhat shabby circumstances in Fulham. The one bright spot in their drab existence is Bobbie's prospects: he is the heir to the estate at Broadbridge Manor. When he takes over the estate, he'll have an income of £10,000 per year (as we are informed over and over again). This was apparently quite the fortune in 1936! Unfortunately, Uncle Massy Cheldon, who at 50ish seems quite ancient to young Bobbie, shows no inclination of helping things along with a natural death any time soon.

Bobbie has fallen madly in love with a lower-class but lovely dancer at the Frozen Fang nightclub named Nancy Curzon. Nancy is willing to marry him, but not if it involves living in poverty. She has been told that an American tour showcasing the dancing talents of her and her partner Billy Bright is in the works, but she and Billy would have to be married first (somewhat antiquated morality!). Bobbie is naturally becoming desperate at the thought of losing Nancy. A somewhat shady acquaintance of Nancy's, ex-boxer Nosey Ruslin, hears of poor Bobbie's predicament. Nosey insinuates himself into Bobbie's life, seemingly befriending the younger man and offering to help him out financially from time to time as necessary. The dim and naive Bobbie takes Nosey at his word (naturally).

Nosey and Billy, meanwhile, are plotting ways to get rid of Uncle Massy and, once Bobbie has the impressive yearly income, help themselves to a large portion of it. Bobbie is rather wishy-washy, but willing to do anything to keep Nancy. It's therefore no surprise to the reader when the titular Murder in Piccadilly occurs (in Piccadilly Underground station, in full view of hundreds of witnesses) and Uncle Massy is no more.

Enter Chief Inspector Wake of Scotland Yard. He has a pretty good idea of who was behind the murder, but with no many witnesses all claiming not to have seen anything, he's going to have a hard time proving anything. In fact, his complete assurance of who was behind the murder (and who had absolutely no knowledge of it beforehand) seems to have come out of nowhere. His discussions with his second in command, Detective-Sergeant Clarke, go over and over the suspects and why they are or are not involved, but never seem to have much evidence backing them up.

The action in the story is extremely slow, and the characters seem to have the same discussions over and over again. There is a final "twist" that is, I assume, meant to confound the reader, but I thought the overall resolution was rather weak. Also, some of the language will be rather startling to modern ears -- particularly the ethnic slurs that are thrown around rather casually. I know that we are supposedly dealing with lower-class and uncouth individuals (those in Nancy's circle, anyway), but it's still rather jarring to read.

Sadly, even a London setting couldn't save this story!

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Murder in Piccadilly from Poisoned Pen Press in exchange for this review

Final Verdict for Murder in Piccadilly:
One Gherkin, for being a long, drawn-out mystery with an unsatisfying ending